


And Knows The Laws Of Heaven

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [9]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: (i really love that Sandman is technically in the DCU okay), British Slang, Butterflies, Chaos versus Order, Chaotic Good, Earth-3, Friendship, Gen, Humor Hammer to the Rescue, Klarion has been rebooted for basically his every appearance anywhere in anything, Lawful Evil, Marmalade Cat, Mind Control, Mirror Universe, Museums, Owlman is not in this fic, Sandman references, Save The City, cosmic villain attack, incredibly dated slang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-14 21:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8029216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: "People say…there are no coincidences. That everything happens for a reason, that there's some great plan in which every little incident and fallen leaf is foreordained and significant. It's propaganda, is what it is. Trying to get everyone emotionally dependent on Order. The thing they don't want you to know is, everything matters anyway. Whether there's a reason or not. Whether it's useful or not. It matters.""I know," Jokester said.Klarion smiled up at him, baring a hundred long sharp teeth in the friendliest way you could imagine. "You know," he remarked, "I think you do!"





	And Knows The Laws Of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> _Whoever yields properly to Fate, is deemed_   
>  _Wise among men, and knows the laws of heaven._
> 
> -Euripides
> 
>  
> 
> 'Nobody **clever** bes boxes!'
> 
> -Shivering Jemmy, Lord of Chaos

"Nabu, you old slave-keeper," said the skinny blue-faced boy as he stood on the windswept hillside.

Judging by the jocular, distrait air he projected, you might have thought he was reasoning with an old friend, and Jokester resolved to learn to copy the attitude. It was guaranteed to drive Owlman clear up a wall and halfway across the ceiling. "Don't suppose you could be persuaded to let the man go?"

The towering blue and gold form of Fate, Lord of Order, managed a withering look with the unshifting surface of its helmeted face. Nice trick. "When this world has been set to order, I may set him aside."

"Well, that doesn't sound like a good bargain, does it, Teekl?"

The marmalade cat wrapped around the boy's shoulders yowled agreeably, and he scratched her under the chin. "Not a good bargain at all."

"I am not fool enough to bargain with Chaos. Your word is not worth the breeze that carries it."

Jokester, crouching in the brush and bracken, held his own breath, and held back a swallow in case it might be heard. You could see his city all spread out from here, a slanting meadow high on the limestone bluffs that lay northwest, and from this distance it looked exactly as it always did, but he knew it was actually full of a hundred thousand people all doing exactly what they were supposed to.

People _never_ did exactly what they were supposed to. They daydreamed and jaywalked and asked inconvenient questions, but Gotham wasn't anymore. Gotham was in perfect order.

People went to work. They ate. They slept. Children, in a mechanical fashion, played. Protection money was proffered and duly collected, because that was a kind of order as well; Fate wasn't picky. Jokester hadn't seen anybody fight or even complain since early yesterday.

It had been three days from hell itself, watching what he'd thought at first was the invasion of the pod people sweep slowly over the city. On the second day, he'd been at Louise's diner with Alonzo, trying to put together a plan to get to the bottom of the weird, when the cheerful noise that always filled the place had suddenly subsided. Several of the patrons, who'd been wasting time over extended lunches when they really should have been elsewhere, had risen, paid, and left. The usual clatter of pans from the kitchen had dropped to the mere occasional clank.

Conversation had resumed at a subdued hum. The four-year-old standing up on her seat at the corner booth had calmly sat down and taken a sedate sip of milk. Alonzo had pulled his feet out of the aisle.

"'lonzo?" J had asked, as his stomach sank into his boots.

"Hm?" Alonzo had asked, his eyes refocusing.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," his friend had shrugged, which was no comfort at all because none of the people acting strange had felt there was anything weird about it when J asked. He'd just _told_ Alonzo that. "Nothing's wrong, Jamie," Alonzo had added, scruffing absently at the evening growth of stubble on his neck, with a pull to his mouth that told J he was reconsidering his usual pride in the manliness of exuberant facial hair. "Though, you know…you should probably get a last name, come to think of it. It's kind of messy, only having one."

J had lost interest in the rest of lunch.

His apparent immunity had been welcome but not really comforting; he wasn't sure how far this was going to spread, or who to warn, and could already see himself being left as the last disorderly person on Earth, and if he hadn't followed an insistent marmalade cat into a blind alley on the third day, Jokester might have gone significantly more mad than he already was.

But he had, and when the cat had sat down to smugly wash a forepaw, there'd been a skinny blue arm groping blindly out of nothing, hanging disembodied in the air near the dead-end of the alley. J had stared stupidly at it for several seconds before the beast had yowled impatience and a voice, equally from nowhere, had exclaimed: "Teekl! You found someone? Give us a hand, then, won't you, whoever-you-are?"

The blue arm had reached out toward him, grasping blindly. And the voice had sounded _nice,_ and far more alive than anyone he'd heard in hours and hours, so J hadn't hesitated a bit to put his hand in the cool blue one and _pull_.

The thin blue arm had been followed by a thin blue boy, wriggling headfirst from nothing in a sober seventeenth-century suit and mismatched red and yellow socks, who introduced himself as Klarion, the Witch-Boy, Lord of Chaos. "Somebody's gone and donned the helmet again," he announced, after J had reciprocated with his own much shorter and less impressive introduction, and a handshake.

"Thanks, Teekl," Klarion-the-Witch-Boy added, not at all like someone talking to a pet, as the fluffy orange feline swarmed up his side to settle on his shoulder. His eyes were no color at all. But their expression was lively with cheer. "I always warn them," he shook his head, "but sooner or later some bennish cully always does it anyway."

"Helmet?" J said hopefully. It was possible this one strange thing had nothing to do with the other strange thing that was already going on, but a man had to hope.

"The Helm of Fate. You can tell a human named it; Nabu's never had any head for puns."

On the whole, it wasn't a big surprise that the blue witch-boy from nowhere talked about humans with an outsider sort of tone, though J hadn't liked to assume. He got mistaken for an alien sometimes himself, with the face he had now. No call to be color-ist.

"I try to pop by whensoever I spy as Nabu's gotten a new avatar, but he's put a real stranglehold on this patch of dimension, trying to keep me out. The hole we found was only big enough for Teekl. I needed help and she, for all her qualities, hasn't any hands. So," Klarion cracked his knuckles, and for a second his fingers seemed to be all joints, at least three times as long as they should be, tipped in claws and curving like nothing human. "What sort of mess am I making today?"

…he still looked nice.

"The kind that ruins mind control, I hope," J answered frankly.

"Hah! That's a right fetch. Just my sort. I shall see what I can do, shan't I? Let's off to find the man in the evil hat!"

"Hat?"

They wandered out of the alley as Klarion explained about the Lord of Order who took the earthly form of a helmet and how he could act only through a possessed host, and how yes they'd been feuding for simply _eons_. "So," he concluded. "Where do we go first?"

The responsibilities inherent in being the native guide to an undercover Lord of Chaos were slightly imposing. J stopped and stared into traffic while he thought.

A bus sailed by with an advertisement for the visiting Sutton Hoo collection at the Gotham Museum of History and Art, the iconic helm with its fierce little bronze moustache reminding him as always of that one weird police lieutenant, Gordon, and a connection flashed together in his head, a confusing rumor he'd gotten a few hours before the pod-person thing started, about a robbery at the museum that had gone completely unreported, like the museum director was covering something up…except what Natalia had _said_ was that it looked like every time he went to call the cops, he forgot what he was doing.

J didn't know exactly what had been stolen, but he knew which room it had come from, and what the most interesting thing in that room had always been. Interesting especially because, according to its placard, it was a source of profound controversy: Experts disagreed wildly about what century and what _continent_ it originated from. J liked things that were hard to categorize.

"Hey, Klarion," he said, as he watched the unexpectedly inspirational #237 roll away toward the end of the block, glowering its ancient threat at expressionless passersby. "Is the Helm of Fate sort of golden and stern?"

"That's the one!"

"Then I think I've got a lead."

Breaking into the museum would be easy. Jokester had himself removed three pieces of art from the place over the last few years – one on a sort of dare, which he'd returned, although he'd kept it an extra day because it was _very_ pretty, one as part of a sting, also returned, and one because it was a powerful mystical artifact that should never have been removed from the headwaters of the Nile.

Stupid colonialism. On the whole it wasn't a shock to learn that there'd been another magic gewgaw in a display case there, though from what he was getting, this one _wanted_ to be displayed. It was a trap. Which meant solving the problem wasn't going to be nearly as easy as breaking in and restoring it to the rightful owners, before they killed anyone or otherwise got themselves arrested.

The Witch-Boy moved with a bounce in his step, one that, if you paid attention, demonstrated a shaky relationship with gravity, and was easily distracted by such marvels as television advertisements and newsstand candy bars. On the other hand, after Klarion's first nearly-catastrophic (though admittedly whether for him or the oncoming vehicle J couldn't be sure) encounter with a DON'T WALK sign, which he had reflexively disobeyed, he and J pointedly (but carefully) jaywalked across every street they encountered all the way downtown, and the vigilante had never been so grateful to have someone share his opinion on something.

He'd spent days by then trying to get someone, anyone to understand what was wrong with the way Gotham had changed. The crime rate was way down, he'd been told. Things were as they should be. Things were _better._

It was…sort of true. There wasn't any conflict, and people weren't _unhappy_ , exactly, although watching police herd unresisting homeless people into vans to be locked up for indigence had been pretty hideous, but…well, that was it, really. There was no strife because everyone had ceased to strive. Whether they were Bruce Wayne in his tower or Ricky Balbón on his streetcorner, everyone had stopped trying to change their circumstances.

Change was flux, after all, and flux was chaos. Nothing irritated Fate like hope.

"People talk about entropy as if chaos and death are the same thing," Klarion complained somewhat later that evening, blowing polka-dotted butterflies out of a bubble-wand he'd found in a corner, where the newly dutiful street-sweepers hadn't caught it, while J fought with the museum security system trying to find the right tape to see who this Nabu character was wearing.

"'tisn't fair and 'tistn't true. Death is the bit where things stop moving; entropy just means that part happens at the _end_. And only if nothing breaks in, to hurry it all up again."

"Something 'bout…a closed system?" J had hazarded, as yet more fast-forward video of golden mask in glass case began to play. Tourists zoomed about the screen like bees. It had to be soon; this was footage from four days ago and the theft couldn't have happened less than three, assuming the events weren't somehow unconnected. "I didn't exactly go to school."

"No matter, school and smart haven't that much to do with—ooh! That man! He's looking at Nabu funny!"

"He works at the museum," J informed him, figuring chaos dimensions were probably short on the significance of little metal name-tags.

"I'll lay you a croker he's the one." J gave him his best what-are-these-stakes-you're-offering-exactly eyebrows, and Klarion amended, "A groat." There was an awkward few seconds of pause, before he seemed to stumble across some buried fragment of knowledge and correct himself, "A _nickle._ "

That was a wager J's finances could handle.

The evening of the same recorded day, after the museum was closed, security footage showed that same middle-aged man in a cheap black suit steal up to the case, unlock it with a small ring of keys, lift the Helm of Fate from its cushion, and set it on his head. There was a flash of light.

The rest of the footage was blank.

"Hah!" said the Lord of Chaos.

J fished a nickel out of his pocket and handed it to Klarion, who gazed at it in perplexity as if he'd already forgotten all about the bet.

J then dug through employee records (it was a _fascinating_ new experience being the sensible grounded one, seriously, wow, he was all for new experiences but _wow_ ) until he identified the man from a rabbit-eyed ID photo and looked up his address, and they went there. The man's name was Herbert Hawes, and he was a sub-curator, and he lived in Priest Heights just over the Westward Bridge, which was in the northern quarter of the city, in what turned out to be a rather lonely four-room second-floor apartment with bookshelves organized by subject, author, and color of spine.

Klarion reported at once that Fate had definitely been using this as his base, presumably using extradimensional magic-smelling senses, and they broke in and left him a pointed note on the inside of the front door, on one of Herbert Hawes' yellow sticky notes.

Then they left a note about the note on the table, in case he wasn't using the door to come and go and so didn't notice the first note, and then they left a note about the note _about_ the note on the bathroom mirror, just in case Fate was bothering with bodily functions and not just magicking them away. Teekl bit the lid off Hawes' toothpaste, and complained to Klarion about the flavor all the way out of the building in a series of deeply expressive yowls.

Then Klarion wanted sandwiches, and tried to pay for them with five hundred identical nickels.

The sandwich guy was a friend of J's, and normally that would have mattered, but Gotham was an Orderly city right now, and Pasha nearly tried to have Klarion arrested for counterfeiting. Of _nickels._ J was able to convince him (partially via Klarion vanishing the nickels into bubbles, and also being blue, which rational people, meaning at the moment _everybody_ , assumed was stage makeup) that it was only a joke, which while not to Pasha's taste anymore was not actually illegal, and J gave him some real money and they got their food and J tried to enjoy it.

It was a good thing that tracking down Herbert Hawes had worked, because J's fallback plan would have been to get Ed Nigma to hack a message to Lord Fate onto every TV in Gotham. His hacking skills weren't at that level so he couldn't do it himself, and Ed was just as brainwashed as everyone else and would have been pretty hard to persuade. Klarion approved of the backup plan for his backup plan, which was to hijack a skywriter and fly a message into the clouds, but J's piloting skills were only about as good as his hacking ones, and screwing up at trick flying was a bit bigger deal than flubbing some code.

"Jack of all trades and master of none," he explained, through a mouthful of corned beef on rye.

"I thought your name was Jay."

Teekl devoured an entire salami and jalapeño sandwich, pumpernickel and all, which would normally have fascinated Pasha the sandwich guy. Today he didn't care, and J forced himself to finish all the bread and meat and mustard he'd paid for, because he'd need all the strength he could pull together to make this right.

"So did we invite him to talk, or to set a trap?" J asked, when they'd said goodbye to Pasha.

"Yes."

"Gotcha." Jokester walked in silence beside the scrawny Lord of Chaos for a block and a half before saying, "I'm helping."

Klarion stopped still, with each foot on a sidewalk crack, and looked up at him with those deep eyes that had no color.

J wasn't frightened, looking back—he didn't have the knack, and anyway there was no eldritch horror that could be worse than all his friends being turned into law-abiding mindslaves by an evil hat—but he did think, for the first time, _really hard_ about the fact that his new friend was several times older than the human race, and theoretically possessed of unfathomable cosmic power. Even if all he'd used it for so far was making things like butterflies and nickels.

Then the sharp blue face broke into a grin, that stretched like his hands had, until it was an inhuman twin of Jokester's own. "Never doubted it."

J could deny that he was touched, but it'd be a lie.

"Uh," he said, shuffling his feet a little when he'd gotten through being teary-eyed. "So. _How_ can I help?"

Teekl meowed derision from the pavement, but Klarion just waved a hand. "You're part of this world. You're _already_ helping."

J nodded. Okay. "How's that work?"

"You got me here, didn't you? Look, Nabu—the helmet contains him. Constrains him, some, but means he hasn't to fence out any energy on staying on this petal of reality. S'a permanent foothold. I haven't got that. I can send Teekl places and follow her, but she doesn't belong here either." He shrugged, a rolling gesture. "I could do what he's done, but I don't _want_ to. I can go near the wind as anyone, but there are limits. People've tried it to me, noose me for a power, but—so far it's never stuck." He grinned. "Just forcing me to turn up by dint of ritual is a task and a half!"

"Because…rituals are patterns," J realized. "Which means they're always partly his."

"Well, not to say Nabu _personally_ —there's lots of us, both sides—one of his brothers is a _cardboard box_ —but yes. Can you imagine being a cardboard box, though? On _purpose?_ "

J could imagine anything. "I don't think I'd keep it up very long," he said.

"Just so! Because it's _boring._ " Klarion shook his head. "Bad enough being a hat." He heaved a sigh and bent down to lift Teekl into his arms, and she snuggled fuzzily under his chin with remarkable patience. "So. It's more work for me to stay here. You helped. You're helping. I'm glad Teekl found you." The cat rubbed the side of her face against the sharp blue chin. _Praise me more_ , J translated. Klarion petted her absently, and looked up.

J looked back. At some point, he would stop being surprised by the eyes that went down forever.

Klarion told him, "People say…there are no coincidences. That everything happens for a reason, that there's some great plan in which every little incident and fallen leaf is foreordained and significant. It's _propaganda_ , is what it is. Trying to get everyone emotionally dependent on Order. The thing they don't want you to know is, everything matters _anyway_. Whether there's a reason or not. Whether it's _useful_ or not. It matters."

"I know," Jokester said.

Klarion smiled up at him, baring a hundred long sharp teeth in the friendliest way you could imagine. "You know," he remarked, "I think you do!"

Jokester nodded, thoughtfully. "Is this why I'm the only one he didn't—get to?"

"The only one who didn't pike off, at least," Klarion agreed. Which had honestly never occurred to J as an option. Huh. Leave Gotham? While it was in trouble? What a thought. "You're human, you can't go _all_ the way to either side. But you're ours." He grinned. "And all in antic dress—Jemmy'd _love_ you. I wouldn't say he _can't_ get to you, but he'd have to work for it." He nodded to himself, and Teekl butted against his chin for better petting. "Anyway," Klarion concluded. "You're already helping."

J shrugged. "Okay. But is there something I can do more— _actively?_ "

Klarion shrugged too. "What have you got?"

* * *

And now they were having that meeting, Klarion and Teekl facing down Fate on a windswept hill overlooking the city, while the Jokester crouched in the brush trying not to rustle or breathe too loud, and the Lord of Order had declared Klarion's word worthless.

"No call to be a boor about it," the witch-boy sniffed, tangling his fingers in Teekl's long orange fur. "But very well, then, if you won't bargain, how's gambling sound?" His free hand spun through the air and opened on a pair of jet-black dice, the faces etched with Roman numerals in gold. "Rules for you. Chance for me."

"You'll cheat. You don't even know the meaning of not cheating."

" _I_ cheat? What do you call press-ganging ten thousand souls into your camp all willye-nillye?"

"They are in order. They are content."

"It isn't _real,_ " and it sounded almost like Klarion still thought he could convince the guy, make him understand why what he was doing was wrong, even though they had been having this argument in various forms for thousands of years. They did say madness was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, and J couldn't really consult on that because he was that same kind of crazy, but he approved so much.

Fate shrugged, his cape stirring magnificently. "Is it not written, that _any factor that is the same for all percipients will be said to belong to reality?_ "

"Who say what? No. Your logic is stupid. Making everyone agree that something is true _doesn't actually make it true._ "

"Oh, but it _does._ Take jaywalking, for example. In the early twentieth century there was great public outrage over how many motor vehicles were running people down in the street, at a rate horse-drawn conveyances had never approached."

The magical helmet's stolen voice grew thick with gloating. "So automobile manufacturers launched an advertising campaign characterizing walking in the street as an ignorant behavior, only fit for rural 'jays' who didn't understand city life. Within five years it was generally agreed that only cars had a right to the major thoroughfares, and anyone killed by walking in them had brought it on themselves, and laws were passed to that effect. Crossing streets inappropriately became a minor criminal offense."

Klarion's face had scrunched up in disdain until it barely looked human anymore. "I knew there was a reason I hated the crosswalks," he said. Let blue skin go smooth, and shook his head, tossing the dice in his palm. (As they rose and fell the obsidian became night itself, became flame, became the polished bone surface of astrigali etched by master craftsmen with the figures of stars, and then they were merely stone again.) "Look, though. I promise not to cheat. You can roll the dice yourself, if you want. Two of 'em, six sides each. If the number comes up evens, you win. Odds are to me."

A scornful rumble. "And why would I give up my gains here on the whim of the dice? That's no wager, when you have nothing at stake. No, I'll take those odds, but if I win, I get the city… _and_ your cat."

"What?" Klarion asked blankly. "No!"

Fate ignored him. A gleaming pair of dice had already appeared in his glove, and he cast them—not onto the uneven surface of the ground and the fine, naturally short grass but onto a perfectly horizontal slab of light that he conjured in the air.

The dice clacked still. Double threes. "Six," pronounced Fate, and held out a hand, like he expected Klarion to drop Teekl into it without protest. "My game."

"And you call _me_ a cheat!" the slim blue Lord exclaimed.

Despite being incapable of facial expressions, Fate managed to convey a sneer. "I broke no rule." But there was something he didn't know, too focused on his ancient opponent to bother with mere physical surroundings.

The Jokester was behind him.

The rim of his mechanical hammer, wrought of alien Nth-metal and immune to all magic, crashed through Fate's natural protection and struck the helmet with a ringing _clang!_ like every pan Louise hadn't banged in her diner kitchen since the Lord of Order messed with her mind. Nabu stumbled forward on Herbert Hawes' feet, and Klarion's technicolor butterflies swarmed in from nowhere/somewhere/everywhere to blind him from all sides. J swung again, judging his angle by the slope of the golden back, and again Fate rang like a bell.

"Back me up here, Herbert!" Klarion called out, so J knew that somewhere inside the cloud of butterflies he had both hands on the helmet and was pulling. He held back his third swing, in case he hit the wrong entity. Any second now—

Stained-glass wings scattered, _shattered,_ and there was Klarion sitting on the ground with his legs going everywhere, looking terribly human, as Fate straightened up.

"Herbert doesn't _want_ to be rid of me," Nabu pronounced unto his foe, withering. "He likes power. He believes in Order."

So J hit him again.

He didn't stick to the helmet this time, either, because apparently Herbert Hawes wasn't an innocent dupe after all, he was Fate's collaborator, willing accessory to every piece of harm done to his city, and Jokester was so sick of that. "Give me back my friends!" he demanded as he swung, battering at helm and shoulders and back, indiscriminate.

He knew as soon as Fate got a chance to turn around and crush the worm with the handy anti-magic hammer, he was done for, but any damage he could do or distraction he could provide so Klarion could get out of that horribly vulnerable position was something. "Hey, give me back my enemies, even! Give me back my _strangers!_ "

Strangers were just friends you hadn't met yet, and the best thing about strangers was that you didn't know what they'd do because you didn't know them yet, and that spontaneity was just another thing Order had stolen. There weren't any strangers anymore because there was nothing left to discover, no hopes or dreams or silly, useless little habits.

He didn't even care that he sounded like Owlman with his _mine, mine, mine,_ because at least the Owl was human; despite everything he did to try to gain total control of everything, he couldn't. He couldn't _ever._ No matter how he threatened and blustered, even if he started nailing corpses up like a nocturnal shrike, or laced the city water with mind control chemicals, or—he was only a man. He _could not_ be _this_ awful.

Nabu's heavy golden hand lashed out, between the beats of his hammer. But it didn't grab him by the throat, as he anticipated, or strike him down with a super-powered punch or a bolt of lightning. It stopped, short, all five fingers spread, a fraction of an inch from his face.

And then there was light.

* * *

 J found himself in a bright place.

He drifted. The light was colorless, the color of serenity. Everything breathed perfect calm, like floating in a stalled breeze made of flowers.

Nothing hurt. Not the scars in his face or his sides, not the places where broken bones had knit leaving only old aches, not the deep cold place that sometimes twisted in his chest when he looked at other people's families. There was nothing wrong anymore.

The breeze of flowers didn't quite move, but it wafted up around him anyway, murmuring.

_It's better like this, isn't it? Stay. It can be like this forever. Everything is just as it should be. You'll never have to be afraid again._

I'm not afraid anyway, he thought. It wasn't a protest, really. That would probably have been impossible. It was just an observation, but it sent a ripple through the serenity, and serenity gave a little shiver in response.

…huh.

Until he tried to sit up, he hadn't thought of himself as reclining. The surface he tried to brace his arm against wasn't there, though, and his arm didn't want to move, and he found himself frowning. He didn't understand. There was another gust of something that tilted the raft of fragrance, and…he missed the timeless equanimity already. He…didn't sink back into it.

He tried to sit up again, despite having no evidence he hadn't succeeded the first time.

Because he wasn't upset, it was true. He could feel the truth of the promise that he would never have to suffer any distress again. But he wasn't _happy_ , either.

Jokester was a great believer in happiness. There were times when you couldn't be happy, he respected that. Living meant a lot of pain. But there were a lot more times when you _could_ , when you had the choice to shake away the yesterday and tomorrow you couldn't change and the aches that were small enough to put out of mind and say instead, _this, here_. And so many, many times when you had the choice to fix your eyes on something and say _that, there_ and go for it, make it real. Work for it and own it and—be happy.

There were so many things to be happy about, if you looked for them. Friends to be made. Skills to be learned. Performances to give. Flowers to admire. Help to offer. Fights to win. (Any fight you walked away from counted as winning.)

((No it didn't. There were prices no one should have to pay.))

Goodness was not always kind. Freedom was rarely easy. And honesty was never completely painless.

He wanted them anyway.

He _wanted._

* * *

He opened his eyes, and curled his fingers around the hammer-haft pressing against his ribs where he lay tumbled in the wiry grass. The arm he'd collapsed on top of was numb. The towering golden being had turned from him, was bending over the tangled beetle-scrawny limbs of Klarion—and if you looked right it _was_ a beetle he had on its back, mouthparts pinching furiously, helplessly. Fate had his fingers clenched far too tightly in Teekl's ruff, her claws raking the air just short of his glove as she dangled, choking, just like any ordinary adult cat would in her position.

Jokester unfolded like a wrathful jack-in-the-box, his spring made not of coiled metal but all the frustrated rage and hope of every stifled soul. Nth metal arced up to strike Fate under the chin and flung him off his feet, which were not his; he dropped the cat, and at least two of Klarion's thin black limbs lashed out and yanked an ankle, jerking him back and even more off-balance. " _Get it!_ " he shouted, and as Fate's head flew past him at an angle J hooked his fingers around the lower rim of the helmet and held on.

Fate and Hawes wrenched apart like mystic golden Velcro, Jokester holding the one and Chaos dragging the other, and then they'd snapped apart, and Hawes was gasping in the grass, gray-faced and not noticeably conscious. J tried to hold onto the helmet, not trusting it on its own, but it came free so sharply that it slipped clear through his fingers and bounced and rolled to a stop several feet away.

When it didn't move any more, he decided to leave it alone.

"Hey," he said to Klarion. Who was back to having four limbs and a head, without ambiguity. He put one hand, at the end of one arm, in J's when he offered, and was tugged upright, to stand on two feet. "You okay?"

Little Boy Blue nodded. Went over to the helmet lying in the thin, springy grass, and prodded it with a toe so it fell over to sit upright on its lower rim, glowering at his ankles.

"We _could_ exist without each other," Klarion told Nabu. Replying, it sounded like, to something that had been said while Jokester was—away. "The world would just be a lot less _fun_."

Nabu, being an inanimate object at the moment, said nothing.

"Nice job," Klarion told Jokester, next, and he grinned.

"I owe Alexander Luthor something very nice for Christmas," J declared, his hand wrapped around the end of his lovely, lovely hammer. He was honestly _this_ close to cuddling it. "What do you suggest for the man who has everything?"

"Surprises are good."

"Surprisingly, not everybody agrees with that statement." J decided to count it as a measure of his humanity and general attachment to the physical plane that he knew this fact. This was him, being proud.

Klarion laughed, and picked Lord Fate's anchor object up with one hand. He tucked it against his hip, under one arm, upside-down, and J was reminded of nothing so much as someone carrying a basket of laundry.

"So what do we do with it now?" he asked. "Back to the museum?"

"You're so keen to have another round with Nabu within ten years? No, I'll hide it. Someplace nobody's like to glee for it. Not at the bottom of the sea this time; for something so tiny he has an uncanny knack for being picked up by fishermen and suchlike things."

"I'm guessing throwing it into a volcano wouldn't help?"

"Ah—huh. Well, nobody could go looking for him there. Who knows where he'd land when it blew up, though. That's a good idea! Thanks!"

Hawes twitched a little. His face was slowly becoming less grey. J and Klarion looked at him, then back at each other. "Do we take _him_ back to the museum?" Klarion asked.

"Nah," said J after a second. By now Hawes had missed, what, four days of work. He probably wasn't fired, but it wouldn't be fair to drop his boss on him when he wasn't even conscious, even if the guy never figured out that he was the one who'd stolen the helmet. (And with Fate's notice-me-not whammy removed, he probably would. J hadn't stolen the tape. Oh well, not his problem.) "We'll take him home."

Klarion, it turned out, could teleport freely when not oppressed by Order. Teekl raced around the three of them in a circle that turned into a wheel of marmalade-orange, rose up like a ring of fire, and deposited them in Herbert Hawes' meticulously organized living room. J hauled the man over to his sofa and considered cleaning up the notes, but if he woke up with amnesia it would probably be nice to have a _clue_ what had happened, so. He checked him for injuries while he was at it; he _had_ been hitting him with a giant mallet after all. It didn't look like there was going to be anything worse than bruising, though; at least, his spine was okay enough that he could feel when you pinched his ankles, and all his ribs were solid.

Once that was taken care of, he wasn't sure what to do next. "It's really over?" he asked, turning away from the sofa.

"Oh, certes. All mended! Everyone should be waking up now, and—but you know what it's like." And for a second he looked so hangdog and apologetic Jokester wanted to apologize himself for getting brainwashed and letting Fate do—whatever he'd done that had made Klarion manifest as a highly distressed beetle.

"Yeah," he said lightly, instead. "You were right, he got me—but you were right, it wasn't easy, and when he stopped paying attention, hey presto!"

"I think that was all you," Klarion grinned. "Crow _that,_ trusty-trout!"

J was pretty sure _that_ piece of incomprehensibility had been on purpose. "Have to ask, though," he said, once his laughter had failed to wake up Herbert Hawes, "When you predicted that, was it something you could…feel?"

Klarion nodded, shrugged, shook his head. "A bit? For the most, though, it was just the sort of person you act like. You didn't think Teekl was weird."

To be strictly accurate, he had thought she was weird, but it had been a relief. And continued to be kind of neat. She now left off asserting dominance over the coffee table to give him another of her extremely intelligent looks, and maybe the way she and Klarion always seemed to faintly mirror each other's body language even when they weren't looking at each other was just proof that they weren't exactly separate beings, because he suspected they weren't, but they were obviously hugely comforting to each other. "I'm kinda jealous, actually," J admitted.

"You've boatloads of friends!" Klarion replied. (The tune of 'Yellow Submarine' started up in the background.)

J hadn't actually told him that, but he guessed it had been implied when he was going through their options earlier. "Yeah, but nobody like Teekl."

The witch-boy flashed a brilliant grin. "Ooh, Teekl, he called you somebody! He can stay."

Teekl leaned her considerable weigh against his calf and purred in approval, and J raised his eyebrows. "I can stay where?"

Klarion shrugged. "It's just something people say." He grinned, all pointed yellow teeth. "You'll find somebody," he said, and J knew it wasn't a mystical promise, just something encouraging from one friend to another, and preferred it that way. "To make sure you're never lonely."

That would be nice. Yeah. That was what he'd been jealous of, after that awful couple of days where everybody was right there, but also disappearing. He had so many people, but no one who was _his_ so deeply that he had the right to grab them and shake them and ask them to stop this _for him_.

And since Klarion had brought that out into the open, this seemed like a good time to bring up something he'd been not-wondering about.

"You," he said, and looked for the right words, but there weren't any really. "You never asked about my face." Klarion wasn't stupid, and he'd been dealing with humans for thousands of years. He had to have _noticed._

He looked baffled. "Did it matter?" He gave his blue head a little shake. "That is, of course it matters, to you. Faces matter. And you don't get to pick yours. Did you?"

J felt his grin pull tight and hard and involuntary. "No."

"Somebody did it, then."

Logic wasn't so much not Klarion's strong suit as _uncomfortable_ for him, but here he was, picking his way along. He raised one hand, the one not keeping Nabu propped on his hip, the fingers spread wide and curled forward in a sweeping curve that took in J's whole head, and for a second the vigilante's stomach knotted itself in the expectation of feeling his flesh shifting and remolding, but—nothing. "It…doesn't feel like a wound," his blue inhuman buddy said.

The squirm in his stomach was…less unpleasant, this time. "It's not." Like whatever squirmy thing that lived there was settling itself down in comfort. And was also not a parasite. "It's just my face."

And that was true. Had maybe finally finished becoming true today, with Klarion, who was blue, and who didn't think it was important that J was white as chalk. It wasn't a wound someone had given him, it was his _face_. A scar still, maybe always, but a closed one. Klarion beamed at him. "Right! Chear you well," he said, and it was one of his slightly-incomprehensible phrases but it sounded like goodbye clear enough.

"Be seeing you," Jokester said.

"Keep your eyes peeled!" Klarion laughed, and when J gestured like he was peeling an orange he made the face that gruesome gag deserved and laughed harder. He was still laughing when he disappeared, Teekl's yowl rising up around it, and behind it you could hear the baying of wolves, the blasting of trumpets, and the call of an impossibly distant bird….

Out in the street, a horn blasted as somebody cut somebody else off in traffic. A gaggle of middle school students straggled by the window, accusing each other of lying about how many R-rated movies they'd successfully snuck into.

Jokester sighed in contentment, and set off to make the rounds of checking up on all his favorite people.

**Author's Note:**

> This was actually one of the first requests I ever got for this 'verse; I'm assuming the anon in question had been watching Young Justice because they wanted Doctor Fate versus Klarion, which I guess is plausible anyway because magic? But that's the only setting where the Witch-Boy is a) definitively evil and b) a Lord of Chaos, so 'mirror universe Nabu vs. Klarion' made more sense this way. I kept him blue, though. Blue is the best. 
> 
> (If you couldn't tell, J came out of this team-up kind of wanting to be Klarion when he grows up. Also I think this may be the first time Alonzo has appeared on-page, huh.)
> 
> In my head, there's Nabu and Klarion as kids on a playground going "Your logic is stupid!" "Your _feelings_ are stupid!" While tiny Owlman and Jokester roll around tussling in the background. Four-year-old Bruce probably pulls hair. ^^


End file.
